Nie Yuanzi, Whose Poster Fanned the Cultural Revolution, Dies at 98

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Nie Yuanzi at her home in Beijing in 2006. She rose to prominence in the Red Guard movement during the Cultural Revolution for putting up an explosive poster denouncing the leader of Peking University and two other officials, but she later fell from favor.CreditCreditChang W. Lee/The New York Times

When Nie Yuanzi put up a vitriolic wall poster one day in 1966, she plunged into the political maelstrom of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. For the rest of her life, Ms. Nie wrestled with the fame, and the infamy, that her act of rebellion would bring.

The poster brazenly denounced the Communist Party secretary of Peking University, where Ms. Nie worked, as well as two other Beijing officials. After Mao praised the poster, Ms. Nie vaulted to the front of the militant Red Guard student movement, which Mao was stoking to attack his foes.

For a couple of heady years she touched the peaks of power, meeting Mao, consorting with his aides and urging Red Guards to pillory fallen officials and scholars.

Yet even before Mao died in 1976, Ms. Nie (pronounced n’yeh) fell from favor, a casualty of the ruthless politics of that time. When Mao’s successors turned on his Cultural Revolution, which had brought a decade of upheaval, persecution and purges, they also turned on Ms. Nie.

She was imprisoned and made a political pariah, accused of persecuting innocent officials, scholars and students, including Deng Pufang, the son of the later Communist leader Deng Xiaoping. Deng Pufang became disabled after jumping from a building at Peking University to try to escape torment by radical Red Guards.

Ms. Nie died on Wednesday at 98. Her son Yu Xiaodong said the cause was respiratory failure. She was cremated on Friday in a brief ceremony that brought together about 10 relatives, Mr. Yu said.

The Chinese news media has remained silent about her death, a sign of how sensitive the traumas of the Cultural Revolution remain. Next month the country will mark the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, and any reflection on the dark times of the republic is unwelcome.

Chinese scholars who interviewed Ms. Nie said she exemplified how the Cultural Revolution could turn on its own loyalists. The persecutors often became persecuted themselves.

“At the early stage of the Cultural Revolution, she became an important card played by Mao Zedong,” said Bu Weihua, a historian of the Cultural Revolution. “She experienced the Cultural Revolution as a high point for the first two months, only to be followed by tragedy.”

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Red Guards at Peking University in 1967 preparing “big character” posters similar to the one created by Ms. Nie when she was a Communist Party functionary.CreditAPI/Gamma-Rapho, via Getty Images

Ms. Nie tried to rescue her reputation in her later decades. She denied some of the worst accusations against her, including that she had played any role in abusing Deng’s son. But she never offered the full penitence that her critics called for. She instead dwelled on the notorious poster — a public denunciation called a “big-character poster” in Chinese political argot — that she and six other activists put up outside a restaurant on the Peking University campus.

“I accomplished just one thing in the Cultural Revolution: taking the lead in writing that big-character poster,” she said in a profile published in 2016 by the Chinese website of The New York Times. “That poster brought me tremendous fame and prominence, yet it also brought endless pain and torment for the rest of my life.”

Ms. Nie was not a typical Red Guard. When Mao began the Cultural Revolution in 1966, Ms. Nie was a midlevel Communist Party functionary at Peking University. At 45, she was more than two decades older than the high school and university students who formed the bulk of the Red Guards.

Ms. Nie was born on April 5, 1921, in rural Henan Province in central China, the youngest of seven children. Her father belonged to a long family line of well-off landowners and doctors, but many of his children embraced revolutionary politics.

Ms. Nie joined the Communist Party in 1938, in the early years of China’s war against the invading Japanese. She moved to Yan’an, where Mao had established the headquarters of the Communist forces. The wartime struggle fostered unquestioning faith in Mao and the party in Ms. Nie’s generation, Mr. Bu, the historian, said.

After the Communist Party came to power in 1949, Ms. Nie climbed the political apparatus in northeast China. Her big chance came in 1960, when she was transferred to prestigious Peking University.

Despite her limited education, she was among the party loyalists sent to watch over the university, regarded as a seedbed of unorthodox ideas. In 1963 she was promoted to Communist Party secretary of the philosophy department, which was turning out teachers and theorists trained in Marxist-Maoist doctrine.

When Mao called for a Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, Ms. Nie did not question his accusations that dangerous “revisionists” and “capitalist roaders” had infiltrated the party and were trying to derail his revolution.

“I thought that I had to obey Chairman Mao,” she wrote in her memoirs, “In the Vortex of the Cultural Revolution,” published in Hong Kong. “This was personally launched and led by Chairman Mao; of course I had to respond positively.”

Ms. Nie said that she and six other party activists associated with the philosophy department had come up with the idea of a big-character poster laying out their frustrations with the university leader, Lu Ping, but that they had had no plans to ignite a political firestorm.

Some historians, however, have said that Ms. Nie was no innocent — that she was indeed part of a scheme to undermine party leaders by lighting that fuse at Peking University.

“She was attuned to the political struggles in the high ranks,” said Ye Yonglie, a popular historian who was a student at Peking University from 1957 to 1963.

After Ms. Nie put up her poster on May 25, 1966, Peking University erupted in debate. Officials and students were unsure how far attacks could go. The campus was soon awash in rival posters supporting or rejecting the accusations that Mr. Lu, the university’s party secretary, and two other officials were resisting Mao’s orders.

A few days later, Kang Sheng, a powerful security official, reported to Mao about the poster. Mao immediately grasped it as kindling for his Cultural Revolution. He ordered that the poster be reprinted and circulated. He later praised it as the “first Marxist-Leninist big-character poster in the country.”

Ms. Nie leapt to political stardom. She joined Mao when he reviewed a sea of Red Guards in Tiananmen Square. Pictures from that time show Mao and Ms. Nie in cheerful conversation.

But Ms. Nie later said that she had developed misgivings about the Cultural Revolution.

“I didn’t know we were heading toward disaster,” she told The New York Times in 2006. “Once I understood,” she added, referring to the party’s orders, “I stopped following them.”

Even so, she remained a prominent Red Guard leader, trusted by Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife, who was among the most fervent radicals.

Ms. Nie fell out of favor after Ms. Jiang accused her of disobedience in 1968. Mao died in 1976, and a few years later Ms. Nie was arrested and detained. In 1983 a court in Beijing sentenced her to 17 years in prison on charges of persecuting and vilifying people, including party leaders. She was released on medical parole in 1984.

Ms. Nie was married twice; both husbands are dead, her son Mr. Yu said. In addition to him, survivors include another son and a daughter.

“I’ve been described as a counterrevolutionary careerist and schemer, an unforgivably wicked madwoman,” Ms. Nie wrote in her memoirs, which grew to almost a thousand pages when reprinted in 2017. “I tell you readers: Thanks be, I’m still alive, and still fighting!”

Correction:Sept. 4, 2019

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this obituary misstated the number of children Ms. Nie’s parents had. It was seven, not eight.

Amber Wang contributed research.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section B, Page 11 of the New York edition with the headline: Nie Yuanzi, Whose Scathing Poster Fanned the Cultural Revolution, Dies at 98. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe